Were the curtains really just ... blue?
Were the Curtains Really Just Blue?
Or, ‘What your English teacher was really trying to say.’
Quotes from some authors:
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Italo Calvino
“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Ernest Hemingway
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.” Maya Angelou
“That’s what literature is. It’s the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!” Connie Willis
“Themes are for eighth grade book reports.” Two amazing and acclaimed television writers … can’t quite remember their names just now.
__________
In this essay, I will be making a rebuttal to a particular statement. I have summarized the strongest elements of this argument, so that when I argue against it, I’ll be able to make a good case. I have intentionally tried to not belittle or simplify the other position to make my job any easier. Hopefully, this will make the end result better.
I am rebutting the following statement:
“Themes? Symbols? You're putting too much thought into it. Stories are just stories. They’re just entertainment. When you get into the weeds, yeah, anything can mean whatever you want. But the significance is all constructed by your desire to see it.”
Part 1: What happened in English class?
A theme is just a thread that ties ideas together.
A symbol is just one thing that represents some other thing/s.
A message is just a summary of what a narrative ‘says’ beneath its surface.
When you boil them down, these concepts seem very simple indeed. At worst, they seem neutral and benign. At best, they can enrich the fiction we read, and even life itself. What they shouldn’t be is upsetting.
What I have observed, though, is people getting upset. There is a common tendency to dismiss some or all of these ideas. People take stances that span from smug superiority, to apathy, and even hostility.
The internet is fertile ground to observe that kind of thing. When was the last time you corrected someone who was incorrect? You probably saw their mistake, felt a pang of frustration or annoyance, and you just **had** to log in and tell them just how wrong they were. There was an emotional part to your need to reply. If you hadn’t felt that motivating emotion, after all, you might have just kept scrolling. (I used to be a neckbeard-style atheist, so I know the feeling all too well)
So why is it that every time themes, messages, symbols, and motifs are brought up in writing spaces, there are dozens of angry people who cannot resist the chance to say, “Only fools read into fiction this much. The curtains are just fucking blue.”
Where did these negative emotions originate? Who is to blame?
Is there a way out of this hostility?
If you think the curtains are just blue … are you missing out on anything really valuable?
What did teachers actually teach?
A lot of people have memories of High School English class that are … less than fond.
I spoke to some students, some writers, some teachers, and some friends, and a pattern emerged.
Some students had an amazing experience, some had an awful one. Some teachers went above and beyond to explain things, most teachers did their best with disengaged students, other teachers taught by rote, commandment, and rigid conclusions. (Or at least, their students remembered them doing that.)
The bad experiences focused on finding symbols in the text, but not understanding them. The bad teachers seemed to insist that only one answer could ever be correct. Alternative readings or interpretations were not accepted.
There was a flip side, too. It was super common for people to say that they got top marks for essays that they bullshitted entirely. If you pick things at random from the text, and say ‘this means X and that means Y’ at random, and you get top marks … doesn’t that mean that the whole thing is just pseudoscience?
These bad experiences seem like the perfect backstory to bring us to the present day. How can we blame all this unhealthy scepticism? How can we blame those people who were once students in tyrannical English classes? If you are taught that literary analysis is like palm reading, cloud watching, or dream interpretation, then of course, you will spend your whole life believing that it’s all a fraud.
The other major pattern across the spectrum was a distrust—or even hatred—of the idea that any author really sat down and INTENDED for the blue curtains to represent sadness. There is broad agreement here, but I think even a lot of reasonable objections to author intent need a bit more nuance. I’ll return to that in a later section.
If this is you, then I’m here to tell you that there are good methods. Better methods. And some people were lucky to have teachers that taught them well. Other people were lucky enough to find better ways to learn after school.
Everyone who learns to interpret and analyse what they read says that fiction becomes more enriching. Doesn’t that sound great? Wouldn’t you like to be enriched?
Wishy-Washy Interpretations, Academic Pressure, and the Fear of Being Wrong
I am going to define one main concept first: theme. I’m going to give a few different definitions, all of which are true. But when we use them, we’re going to be flexible.
This might seem fuzzy and vague. A lifetime of concrete, dictionary, board-approved definitions of terms might make this uncomfortable. But it’s necessary.
Picture this all like a big wire frame. It can stand on its own and be solid. But if it needs to change, you can bend some of the wires, and the frame will change and hold its new shape. It’s neither floppy nor rigid.
Good answers hold their shape, but we can bend them around if we need to.
A theme can be:
- A summary of subtext in a narrative
- A connecting thread between concepts in a narrative
- An idea that evolves over time in a story, and comes to fruition at the conclusion
- A subject of discourse or artistic representation
- The main idea or message of a story
- The part of the story that resonates emotionally
- A way of stating the internal growth experienced by the protagonist
- “Universal experiences that connect all humans.” Teacher u/short_story_long_
- ALSO, a wildcard : A design focus, as in decorating, eg. A party or wedding. “The theme of my wedding is champagne and seashells”. The concept which ties it all together.
Personally, I’m going to use one particular definition from that list: A connecting thread between concepts in a narrative. I like this one because it encapsulates or hints at all the others. Some of the definitions are too specific. If you have your own definition, please borrow my one just for the moment. You can always discard mine and go back to your own later.
Some definitions say a story has one theme. Others say that stories can have many themes. To get around that, I’ll refer to them either as ‘themes’ or ‘the central theme’.
Now that we have a usable definition, I want to highlight something really interesting that a teacher on reddit told me.
They said that students most often struggled with themes and symbolism due to a fear of being wrong. This fear leads them to often dismiss the whole idea, with typical teenage eye-rolls, or on the other hand, to become paralyzed in their seats. Nobody wants to put their hand up and offer a foolish suggestion. This fear of being wrong is exactly what I want to address.
I see this fear every week on the /r/writing subreddit. Someone will come in, obviously distressed, and ask, “Does my story have to have themes?? Will my story be bad without them?”
Sadly, nobody seeks to reassure them by explaining what themes are or how they work. The answers are inevitably dominated by ones like this: “No! Don’t worry. If you don’t want to have themes, then don’t have themes. You can just write for entertainment 😊”
This might be my psychology degree talking, but despite the reassuring tone, that seems about as helpful as saying, “Don’t worry about your depression! Worrying about it only makes it worse. It will go away on its own!”
The fact is that wishing problems away has the opposite effect. Denying the reality of a problem makes things worse. Themes and symbolism in narrative are basically inevitable, and it’s crucial to understand them.
Fears of being wrong are only corrected by confidence in making good answers.
Remember how things can be ‘wishy-washy’ but still good? Remember the wire frame that you can bend and shape? That’s the reason I said ‘good answers.’ Notice how I didn’t say ‘the right answer’ or ‘the correct answer.’
Answers come in a spectrum. It’s a little wrong to say that a banana is a vegetable. It’s a lot wrong to say that it’s a power tool.
So if answers come on a spectrum, how can anyone ever be right? Does ANYTHING matter?
The trick is to think of yourself like a detective. You need to find evidence, then build a case.
You Already Have All the Skills You Need
To a large extent, interpreting themes and symbols in fiction is just a puffed-up, formal version of what we already do every day. You can already understand subtext and hidden meanings that go deeper than the surface. Many people pick up these routine interpretation skills without even thinking, and for the rest of us these things are possible to learn.
One teacher used emojis to show their class how this interpretation works. You can see this little icon of a facial expression, and know not only what emotion it represents, but how different emojis can be paired together to make mini-stories or nuanced statements. Doing this is, fundamentally, reading subtext. If you can interpret emojis without even thinking, just imagine what else you can interpret.
Another way we encounter it is relating to people who have had similar experiences. Even when the experiences have surface differences, we can feel an emotional connection over the core part of the experience. One person who missed out on a big scholarship might relate to someone else who missed out on a promotion. Those things are not identical, but the experiences are similar enough. They’re connected by the thread of ‘missing out on something they really wanted.’ The important part here is that the emotional part is what’s relatable. It’s the same in stories.
What about meta jokes? In shows like Community or comics/films like Deadpool, what exactly is making the meta jokes funny? These types of comedy will often get laughs from exposing a familiar pattern to the audience, then turning it on its head. As an audience member, you ‘got it’, usually without trying. The reason the joke was funny was never stated or explained. It lies in the invisible connection between stories. Somehow, you were able to see the connections being subverted, and understand the hidden meaning of the joke.
How about in regular, everyday conversations with people? There are dozens of times every day when you can read between the lines in something someone has said. Their words might say, “Yeah, right”, but you interpreted that as a sarcastic expression of doubt. Their words might say, “I’m fine, really, nothing’s wrong”, but you were able to see something that was upsetting them. What helps you see that? Context. The context might be something that’s just happened, or it might be their posture and tone. Either way, you are using cues outside of the literal words to form a theory about what is ‘actually’ being said. Seeing themes works the same way.
You also believe in character arcs, and probably use them in every story. More on this later, but understanding character arcs better is probably 99% of the work you need to do to understand themes. If you believe in and use character arcs, you already believe in themes, you might just not like calling them that.
All you have to do is take these ideas and apply them to fictional stories. It’s not as hard as it can sometimes appear.
So, a theme is a connecting thread between concepts in a story.
You might say, ‘But the human mind is active. It loves to imagine things. You can say anything is connecting to anything and be right. So what’s the point getting so deep with stories? You might as well look for shapes in the clouds.’
To that I say there are still better and worse answers, even when watching clouds. If someone sees a long thin cloud and says it looks like a soccer ball, you won’t nod and say, ‘That’s really valid.’ You’ll send them contact details of the local optometrist.
It’s the same with themes. If someone tells me that Toy Story is secretly about the death of the Prussian King Wilhelm II, I will need plenty of evidence that supports that claim to buy it. If they have none, I will be right to say ‘That answer is not supported enough to be valid.’ Or I’ll just say, ‘That’s a dogsh*t theory.’
There are methods you can use to make sure you arrive at a decent, well-supported, usable, ‘good’ answer. Not ‘the correct’ answer. Not ‘the final’ answer. Not ‘the only’ answer.
A good answer.
One Method for Quickly Spotting Themes—Without Guesswork
Most stories these days involve at least one major character arc. The character goes through an internal change as a result of their struggles in the story. Most avid readers and writers understand this already.
This is good for me, because the easiest, quickest, and most reliable method to find your main theme involves character arcs.
The method goes like this:
- Put the character arc into words: What did they realize? How did they change?
- … That’s it.
Oh, and when you find your main theme this way, you’ve also found what people call the ‘message’. Those things are one and the same, if you phrase the theme as a lesson or ‘take away’.
This is good! Now we have less terms to worry about. Let’s chuck ‘message’ and ‘lesson’ in the bin, and just use ‘the main theme’.
Some examples:
In Frozen, Elsa closes herself off in an attempt to protect others from her magic. Instead, this causes severe weather problems and other conflicts. Only when she stops closing herself off and opens herself up to others does balance return. The main theme there is: Bottling up your problems causes more problems, so it’s best to open up.
In A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge is a miserable, selfish grouch. Ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future come and show him visions of the dire consequences of these traits. Scrooge has a change of heart, and becomes kind and generous. The main theme there is: You will have a better life if you are kind and generous.
In Black Swan, Nina (Portman) becomes increasingly paranoid about Lily (Kunis) taking her spot as the star of the upcoming production of Swan Lake. She seems to suffer from hallucinations, and finally ends up stabbing Lily with a piece of broken glass in a fit of jealous rage. When it is revealed that Lily is actually unharmed, Nina realizes that she stabbed herself, and dies shortly after giving a perfect performance. The main theme there is: If you obsess over others plotting to sabotage you, you might just end up sabotaging yourself. Another valid one might be: If you strive for perfection, you might just get it—but the stress of it could kill you. (Both answers are supported by the text, and neither cancels the other one out. That is how interpretation works—different, but not at random.)
In Pokémon: The First Movie, Mewtwo goes on a telekinetic rampage when he discovers his origin as a clone, a scientists’ plaything. He then clones other Pokémon and fights ‘originals’ in a tournament to prove that clones are superior to originals. When Ash Ketchum is petrified in an attempt to put an end to senseless fighting, Mewtwo is moved by his sacrifice. Ash is revived by the tears of watching Pokémon, and Mewtwo states that we should not be judged by our origins, but by our choices. The main theme there is: We should not be judged by our origins, but by our choices. (Thanks to Mewtwo for stating it aloud).
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby spends all his time looking at Daisy’s green light. When there is a car accident, everyone thinks Gatsby is to blame. But it wasn’t Gatsby in the driver’s seat: It was that damn green light! The theme there is: It was the damn green light all along. Never trust the green light.
I know it’s exhausting to read examples like this if you’re already on board with the whole process. I did have an ulterior motive, though. I wanted to explicitly show a link between this method and stories that range from children’s cartoons, to Arrenofsky films, to classics of literature.
Important notes for this point:
- These aren’t the only themes
- This isn’t the only method
- Analysis doesn’t have to stop there.
Having said all that, the method is pretty sound, pretty useful, and a quick way to get ‘into’ a text. Especially if you’re having trouble ‘getting it’ on a deeper level, having a foundation like this is really helpful.
Nine times out of ten, you’ll find that if you pick out the main theme in this way, you’ll find that answers stop being arbitrary or random. It feels nice to decode something, and to later come across critics, friends, and internet strangers decoding it in the same way. The more people you can find with the same answer, the more confident you can be.
It’s not arbitrary or random, because it follows a method. And it’s not a restrictive, ‘one size fits all’ answer, because we acknowledge other ways to see things. It doesn’t rely on guessing what the author ‘meant’ to express with the story. It is just based on basic evidence, and basic logic.
So in my view, it makes up for all the shortcomings that people are most concerned with. You can set aside fear of being wrong. You can forget about how arbitrary and wishy-washy it all appears to be. You can discard the idea that authors are hiding secret messages everywhere. You can also stop insisting that authors emphatically never intend secret messages. You can let go of the idea that subjectivity makes any act of interpretation pointless.
Best of all, you can come up with a solid answer that works.
But if no single answer is ‘correct’, how can we hope to prove that any given answer is good enough? How do we compare different answers? How do we entertain multiple conflicting interpretations in unison without getting confused?
A quick note on Author Intent
We don’t ‘need’ to know what an author meant to communicate in order to understand the story.
But sometimes, when we analyse a story and learn about the author’s life, it can become clear that author intent can be an important piece in the puzzle.
George Orwell was a journalist. He wrote a story called Animal Farm, and another story called 1984. Both of those books are about government control, authoritarianism, and the lies fed to the populace in order to keep the powerful in power. Neither of them has a happy ending.
To the person who says that no author has ever intended a ‘message’, or that readers interpret books however they want: What about Orwell?
Aren’t his books very clear evidence that authors can intend to write messages?
Is Orwell a special case? An outlier? Maybe.
Most likely, every author who ever lived lands somewhere on a spectrum from ‘never intends messages’ to ‘always intends messages.’ Many probably hang around in the middle, where they think about the themes and symbols of their writing a little bit, but they don’t go to the same lengths Orwell does.
High School English class may not have mentioned this, but George Orwell was a socialist. A democratic-socialist, to be precise. (That’s the anarchy type, not the Bernie Sanders type. Bernie is a social Democrat.) Read Orwell’s autobiographical Homage to Catalonia if you’re interested. Basically, Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war, within a unit of socialists. Their allies, who were Stalinist Communists, harassed and sabotaged the war effort, and potentially brought about the victory for the Spanish Fascists under Franco. Orwell seemed very bitter about it, but remained a dedicated democratic-socialist. Basically, the Stalin type ones hate the anarchist type ones and vice versa.
Does knowing that change your opinion of Animal Farm or 1984 at all?
Is the smiling face of Big Brother a bit more Stalin-like than it was before? And the pigs in Animal Farm (based on Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky and others)—do they seem any different to you?
I think there’s a lot to be said—some of the time, for some authors—about author intent. Sometimes, there is just no denying that a message has been intended. Sometimes, like with Orwell, the entire story is an allegory and/or satire of real-life politics.
The trouble is, what do we do when we talk about the less obvious authors? The ones who don’t ‘seem’ to be intending anything?
The only tool we have in that case is analysis, and evidence. If we think an author intends X, but their story includes instances that contradict X, it may not have been intended.
However, if the same elements keep coming up again, and again, and again … we can start to be more confident that the author meant for us to see it.
Once might be a mistake. A few times might be by chance. But multiple times per book across multiple books?
Your Honour, I believe that repeated instances are evidence of intent.
Different Lenses, Frameworks, and Tools
If you get three people in the same room with The Great Gatsby and ask them what it’s ‘really’ about, you’ll get four different answers.
It’s the same book. How are four different answers even possible? The simplest explanation might be that they’re all making stuff up out of boredom. We did trap them in a room with nothing but a book, after all.
Let’s do a thought experiment that involves their different answers.
The Great Gatsby is about Jay Gatsby, who dreams obsessively of being with a married woman, Daisy. The story is told through the eyes of Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway. Gatsby throws lavish, enchanting parties, apparently as a way to try and tempt Daisy to visit. We learn, as Nick grows closer to him, that Gatsby had been with Daisy before, but wasn’t wealthy enough for her. So Gatsby built a fortune for himself from the ground up, even changed his identity. He finally has an affair with Daisy, with Nick’s assistance. From that moment, he is gradually let down by the reality of being with Daisy, and he now wants her to retroactively have never loved her husband. During a confrontation, Daisy reveals that she loves both her husband and Gatsby. Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, kills her husband’s mistress, but Gatsby takes the blame and is killed. Tom and Daisy withdraw ‘into their vast money or carelessness’ and Nick loses touch with them. The dream is over, and Nick muses that we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The first person, Ashley, says that the story is really about love and beauty, or maybe jealousy. They finally settle on jealousy, because the green light is the colour of jealousy.
The second person, Sam, says that the story is really about class struggle and the myth of the American Dream. Jay Gatsby wanted all those riches, and look where it got him. Dead. The American Dream is a lie.
The third person, Francois, says that the story is really about the objectification of women, and how patriarchal society robs women like Daisy of true agency by reducing them to an idealized prize to be won.
Are they all equally correct? Are they all wrong?
In my opinion, each answer has flaws, but is mostly solid.
Ashley has part of the truth. The story does deal with love, beauty, and jealousy quite a bit. Those are emotional through-lines that you can easily spot. What is lacking is an overarching theme that connects the different threads together. What does jealousy have to do with ‘boats beating against a current’? What does it have to do with the other stuff in the story that isn’t about jealousy?
Sam has part of the truth. The story is so consistently about gaudy wealth that you can’t really escape it. Class analysis is a time-tested way to read a text. There are a few references about pioneers expanding westward, which would hint at the ‘American Dream’ being central to the book. However, there are a few too many things in there that don’t quite add up into the American Dream framework. It seems like the book is about the American Dream, but it’s not only about that. (This one is the most common scholarly analysis, I think, but I find it incomplete. I aim to build a case solid enough to make even hardcore literature nerds tremble.)
Francois has part of the truth. Nobody else in this group properly spotted that Daisy was being reduced into an ideal with no agency, rather than a real person. The feminist angle is valuable to show things about female characters that you otherwise might miss. But it doesn’t account for all the wealth stuff very well. You can say that all that pursuit of wealth is about patriarchy and so forth, but Daisy and Jordan are wealthy, too. It’s an important point to make, but I don’t think we can say it's what the book is ‘about’.
Let’s return to my method: Look at the character arc FIRST.
The mistake I believe the above people make is that they look at the abstract and emotional undertones of the story, and they start to form final answers. I think that’s backwards.
If we do things forward, as I would suggest, then we might have a chance to reconcile all of these different viewpoints. We do this like a statistician making a line of best fit in a data set. Like a detective building a case from the evidence. Like a scientist coming up with a theory to explain their observations.
We judge the answer based on its ability to explain things. If it explains many things well, then it’s a good answer. If it explains only a few things, then it’s not as good.
So what are the character arcs in The Great Gatsby?
Jay Gatsby, while not the point of view character, has a fairly clear arc of the tragic type. Before the book begins, he starts as a penniless officer in the Army. Then we meet him, as a man of extreme wealth and success, who has built up a dream of being with Daisy so potent that it seems impossible. Gatsby himself seems like a larger-than-life legend at first. When he finally gets to be with Daisy, before any real conflict comes along, Nick perceives that he is slightly disappointed in the romance, and the green light loses its enchanting presence. Then, after the car accident, Daisy chooses to stay with Tom rather than be with Gatsby. Gatsby is shot—partly because of Tom—and has no real friends to attend his funeral. Despite all those lavish parties that filled the house, his house is emptied almost the minute he dies.
Nick starts out busy with his job in New York, attending Gatsby’s parties, and enjoying a casual relationship with Jordan Baker. Even he seems to find his cousin Daisy enchanting—dreamlike. The prose, which casts her in an ethereal and impossibly graceful light, cannot be ignored. Gatsby is presented to the reader as this legendary, enigmatic, absorbing character. Notably, the narrator is writing about events years in the past, in a nostalgic mood. He is mostly swept along in the plot, observing and assisting, but not standing up for much or pursuing his own goals. When Gatsby waits below Daisy’s window after the crash, Nick tells him that “You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together” He then admits to the reader that, up until that point, he had disapproved of Gatsby. From that point, though, Daisy seems cold and phony to him. He closes by reflecting that we are all boats against the current, etc.
Both Jay and Nick are disillusioned with things they had previously idealized.
For this reason, I don’t believe that the story is ‘about’ the American Dream. I believe that it’s about disillusionment of dreams in general, and one of the main illusions that is explored and then broken is the American Dream. Remember, themes are also used to ‘make universal ideas resonate’. The American Dream is a specific thing that is covered extensively, but when we talk about the ‘central theme’ I think it’s better to say it’s about the disillusionment of dreams (the general thing which resonates), rather than focus on the specific American Dream, which would miss some things out.
There is a particular focus on nostalgia. Gatsby idealizes his past relationship to such an absurd degree that even being with her in the present can’t measure up. Nick writes about the events years later, infusing the prose with a glow of nostalgia and enchantment.
So my take on the main theme of The Great Gatsby is: ‘Nostalgic dreams cannot sustain you.’ Or maybe, ‘Nostalgic dreams will be the death of you.’
Or maybe, to borrow and mangle the text’s own words, ‘Dreams of colossal vitality—lost love, the American Dream, dreams of conquest and glory—will in reality, always tumble short.’
The main reason it works for me is that is contains all the other proposed themes within it.
This is how they fit in:
- It is about love, beauty, and jealousy – it’s about how Gatsby’s nostalgia over his love for the beautiful Daisy turned into jealousy. But once he had her love, it became hollow.
- It’s about how Daisy is reduced to an ‘idea’ with no agency – because Gatsby’s nostalgia prevents her from ever becoming ‘real’ in his eyes.
- It’s about the American Dream – especially all the ways the Dream turns out to be hollow. The explicit mentions of pioneers and so forth cast the American Dream as a way of striving nostalgically for a past that never really was. In short, all the wealth that Gatsby built up didn’t get him friends, a wife, a family, or any real happiness. The American Dream as a path to happiness is debunked by the text.
Remember in the last section, where I said that author intent is supported when something comes up again, and again, and again?
I’m going to support my argument by showing you how many times ‘dreams’ comes up:
- There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
- No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
- After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.
- There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.
- I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.
- Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”
- …But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on …
- But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.
- … he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.
- If that was true [Gatsby] must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
- A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about …
- West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams.
- Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.
- He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
So what did F. Scott Fitzgerald intend to say with The Great Gatsby, if anything?
We can’t know for sure … but if he wasn’t making a point about the disillusionment of over-worked dreams, all these quotes that explore that idea are a HELL of a coincidence. For me, I’m happy to say that Fitzgerald did intend something in this neighbourhood, at least. There are too many instances to be arbitrary, random, or pure coincidence.
I don’t need to hear it from him. I’ve built a case, and I’m confident in my method.
The value of themes:
What do themes ‘add’ to a story?
I think it’s a mistake to think that only oddball nerds like me, who pick apart stories with tweezers, can get something out of a story that’s full of subtext, themes, and symbolism. I think that themes add something intangible to a story, and the better the themes are done, the better the story. I’m not alone in thinking that.
One analogy I can use to explain this is that of flavour balancing. In cooking, the main tastes are: sweet, sour, salty, umami, bitter, and spicy (and a few more depending on who you ask). Flavour balancing is the concept of making sure that a given dish or beverage has a—you might have guessed—balanced flavour profile.
Each of these main flavours has a way of counteracting or enhancing the others (think of salted caramel, or sweet and sour pork). The important thing is that they counteract other flavours, and have huge impacts in the overall taste, **without necessarily being noticeable.**
If an ingredient can impact a dish without being noticed, then I believe themes and subtext can impact a story without being noticed.
Sweet and sour, for example, counteract each other. If a chef is designing a dessert that is ending up too sweet, they only have to put in small amounts of something sour to reduce the sweetness. Diners can then eat that balanced dessert, and not a single one of them will notice that sour citric acid has been added. But all of them notice that it tastes great. And all of them would have noticed that the dish was too sweet if the balancing hadn’t been done.
You miss it when it’s not there.
I think it’s also a good analogy because writing stories in a way that makes conscious use of themes is a balancing act. If a character gets up on a soapbox and preaches the message of the story, most people yawn. That’s being too obvious. That’s too much salt in the salted caramel.
But if the story keeps its elements in a good balance, then the themes can fly under the radar and enhance the experience.
All this prompts the question—how exactly do themes actually improve a story?
If themes can help a story, does this mean they can also hurt it?
To answer this, I’ll point to something you already know and love: subtext in dialogue.
I think subtext in dialogue is uncontroversial, unlike subtext on a thematic level.
Everyone who pays any attention to any writing guide will learn that characters don’t say, “You have made me so upset! I am angry and hurt!” Instead, they might say, “I can’t even look at you right now!”
We want dialogue scenes to employ good subtext. This is for a few reasons:
- Subtext is a common way for people to communicate in real life. Euphemisms, veiled threats, and sarcasm are common examples of saying one thing and implying another. Making characters behave in a believable way is Good Writing 101.
- It follows the 2+2 = ? principle. Readers and viewers are more engaged when they have to interpret the meaning of the dialogue and action. If everything is handed to them, they switch off.
- It gives a chance to use juxtaposition, or to undercut what a character is saying. E.g.: ‘ She fumbled with her cigarette packet. “Everything is going fine. I’m great,” she said. She slipped, and all her cigarettes fell out and landed in a puddle. “See? Just doing amazingly well.” ‘
- Giving a scene or a character more depth and more levels is widely recognized as a good thing to do. Subtext in dialogue gives more depth to the dialogue.
And here are some reasons you will want your story to have well-constructed thematic subtext:
- Themes are a common part of real-life communication. Many people tell anecdotes or stories with a point to them. (This is how I got over my break up; This is how I succeeded in getting fit; This is why you shouldn’t believe everything you hear) Those who speak while never making a point are recognized as rambling on, saying nothing.
- It follows the 2+2=? principle. It is not engaging for a character to simply say “Happiness is a good feeling but sadness is also valuable.” It is more engaging to see Joy and Sadness personified, like in Inside Out, and learn their respective value through a journey.
- It gives a chance to comment on real-life situations. From Animal Farm to Black Mirror to The Handmaid’s Tale, many stories which seem to be speculative or fantastical have a lot to say about our world.
- Giving a story more depth or more levels is widely recognized as a good thing to do. Thematic subtext in a story gives more depth to the story.
The process of understanding 2+2=? while reading a story is one of the greatest pleasures of fiction.
All of you, I’m willing to bet, already believe in ‘2+2=?’ as a technique for dialogue. All I’m saying is that the same principle works to enrich the structure of a story—its themes.
Have you ever noticed when a scene of dialogue is bad and clunky due to a lack of subtext?
Many readers who have never really come across the concept of subtext feel that something is ‘off’ with the scene as well. They might not be able to express why, but they know what they feel.
I have observed a same thing when a story has inconsistent or poorly implemented themes. I can spot why a story feels ‘off,’ why it doesn’t quite come together. Stories like that always feel like less than a sum of their parts.
Other people, including writers, who don’t have a proper working definition of themes will also feel that same gut-feeling of incompleteness. The story might have great scenes, or interesting characters, but the story itself is forgettable.
It’s like a dialogue scene without subtext: there aren’t enough layers there to engage you. Even if it’s only your subconscious that’s being engaged by themes, it’s your subconscious that notices when that crucial ingredient is missing.
The next time you come across a story that feels hollow, like there is some ‘special ingredient’ missing … have a look at the theme of the story. Did it come across clearly? Was it haphazard? Did some scenes say X, while others said Y?
On the flip side, when a story really, really resonates strongly with you, have a look at the themes it is built around. More often than not, these stories that you love most, and still enjoy year after year—they might have a few flaws, but they almost never have poorly constructed themes. Because the theme is the part that resonates.
In all my years of looking at stories, trying to break them down and understand them, and then also building them up to see them as a whole without slicing them into little pieces, I have found themes to be a consistent bedrock.
A story with admirable themes can still be bad (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), because the themes are really just the foundation. Stories that are built on shaky foundations are almost always … wobbly. And the greatest stories of all time, the ones that endure, the ones by long-dead authors that still resonate with us today—they invariably have something *more* to say than the words on the page.
Conclusion, and a final word on ‘Symbolism’
So, back to the example in the title. The blue curtains.
Here’s one iteration of the original meme:
>Student: The curtains are just blue.
>Teacher: No! The blue curtains represent the character’s depression.
>Author: The curtains are just fucking blue.
What if the author just wrote some random, throwaway description? Then, what if some English teacher opined about how the blue curtains represent depression over a century later? Wouldn’t that author turn in their grave?
I can’t give you an answer that pertains to the actual blue curtains. They are a strawman, built for the specific purpose of being easy to knock down.
I have a hilarious little irony to point out to you. ‘The curtains are fucking blue’ is, itself, an example of symbolism.
A symbol is a device that uses one thing to represent another, right? The ‘blue curtains’ represent a wider problem. They represent the frivolous pursuit of literary analysis, and the hubris of a teacher that inserts meaning where it doesn’t belong. The physical curtains are transformed into abstract ideas—the very essence of symbolism and motif.
The delicious, delicious irony of that is just perfect to me. In an attempt to debunk the idea that fiction has symbols, the author of that meme used a symbol.
They also had a message—a central theme—when they made that meme. The message is: Teachers will take random descriptions and elevate them to literary significance. Or perhaps, Literary analysis is all arbitrary, and therefore bogus.
So … by denying that fiction can use one thing to mean another, the maker of this meme made a mini-story in three acts, complete with a symbol and a central theme.
Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate that, then move on.
I think Gatsby’s green light is the real example that most people have in mind when they reference ‘blue curtains’. I personally love the book. Nowadays I re-read it every year. I did, however, have to take an 8-year break after high school before I could stomach going back into it. Learning to analyze a book, at least in a school setting, is the surest method to get you to hate it.
So, right here at the last minute of the essay, let’s return to the green light.
What does the green light ‘mean?’
>“… he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light …”
>‘ “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.” ‘
>“It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
>“I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could fail to grasp it.”
>“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
You tell me what you think the green light means, after all that I’ve told you.
Is it:
A) Greed
B) Jealousy
C) The American Dream
D) Something else?
No wrong answers. Just remember: you have to show your working. I’ve shown mine.
Here is the secret of symbols, motifs, and other similar techniques: they are all subservient to the main themes. Don’t pick out a random green light and figure out what it means—that’s backwards. A symbol is just a piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t mean anything on its own. It’s like a single letter in a sentence—you can’t understand what role it has unless you read the whole sentence first. At the same time, if that letter was taken out of the sentence, what would be missing?
So, having said that. Figure out the overall theme first, and then figure out how the particular symbol is used within that theme.
What does the green light mean?
You tell me.
Want to try a book full of symbolism?
Grab a copy of my book The Dragon That Never Was here.
Read it with everything I told you in mind. What does the story mean to you?